Some laws reflect the intuition that a child’s real parent is whoever raises them. Adults have constitutional parental rights only if committed to parental roles, and state rules for presumptions and de facto parenthood protect relationships formed by caregiving. Anyone who raises a child obtains a personal duty to protect the child and claim to preserve the relationship built by their caregiving. These personal relations are weaker than parenthood and cannot explain who has a liberty to raise a child in the first place. Nevertheless, caregiving is central to political parenthood. A community may not allow anyone to take indefinite custody without a duty to fulfill the child’s right to care and guidance. The adult and child then acquire a right to the relationship. Other principles, too, must explain who may raise children. Gestational work does not justify exclusive authority over a child, although it can justify a nonexclusive birth presumption. Third-party caregiving cannot generate rights because a parent is entitled to seek childcare assistance. To ensure children’s primary relational goods, the community must have legal rules specifying when a parent has delegated too much childrearing for too long, forfeiting their authority to revoke the caregiving privilege or oppose parenthood.

The chapter explores the concept of the individual as a democratic citizen who voluntarily exercises rights and authority, and can both legitimize and delegitimize the government. It suggests that Western secular cosmological dualism, which separates the world from man, has led to the development of the modern individual, capable of introspection, autonomy, and agency. This dualism creates a divide between the physical human body and the autonomous human mind and spirit. It has facilitated the simultaneous growth of natural sciences and humanities. The chapter examines how this secular imaginary, based on the separation of Nature and man since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is reflected in the philosophical discourses of influential thinkers like Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, and Kant. They explored the potential of this separation to evolve human agency in politics and to derive universal rights from Nature to safeguard individual freedom in society and politics. This dual cosmology also led to the development of social sciences and varying views on voluntarism and natural determinism, as seen in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. Finally, it shows how Nature has become a cultural resource through art.

Nineteenth-century studies has – like other fields – sought to move beyond the notion of progressive secularization in which religious beliefs disappear in modernity. But what will replace this paradigm? A compelling alternative emerges when we attend to how the Romantics and Victorians resist what Charles Taylor calls “excarnation” – the modern construal of religion primarily as inward belief unhooked from material reality and ritual forms. The Romantics’ and Victorians’ liturgical fascinations signal a suspicion of excarnation and an attempt to re-poeticize religion. The full significance of this use of liturgy, however, only appears in light of a much deeper genealogy of modernity stretching back to the late-medieval rise of voluntarism and nominalism. Such a genealogy reveals the theological origins of so many modern bifurcations (natural/supernatural, reason/faith, etc.) – bifurcations that nineteenth-century texts challenge and rethink by way of liturgy. Examples from Keats, Hopkins, Carlyle, Arnold, Dickens, and others forecast the book’s main arguments.

The liturgical forms depicted in William Wordsworth’s Excursion (1814) provide the foundational instance of the nineteenth-century resistance to excarnation and the natural/supernatural binary. Rather than naturalizing otherworldly Christian doctrines – as seminal readings of Romanticism suppose – The Excursion’s rituals disclose how material reality already participates in the divine. This participatory vision challenges voluntarist pictures of God as a large, powerful being who exercises his arbitrary will over creation – a picture of God often unwittingly adopted by modern readers. Divine participation, moreover, challenges typical readings of Wordsworth’s lyrical inwardness. For, liturgy not only draws the poem’s characters out of themselves, it also sacralizes nature. Nature’s sacredness in turn opposes the desecrating rituals – or anti-liturgies – of industrialization. Via liturgy, then, Wordsworth comments on material conditions and remains historically engaged. The Victorians will repeatedly echo this use of liturgy to sacralize material reality and to resist any forces that would violate that sacrality.

The Cambridge Platonists’ philosophy of religion might be summed up as a tension between their commitment to the fixed nature of reason and goodness on the one hand and a commitment to freedom and distaste for all forms of tyranny and imposition on the other. This last chapter contends that the Cambridge Platonists not only acknowledge this tension, but embrace it, revelling in the paradoxical way that absolute fixedness and absolute freedom come together at the highest levels of being. This is made possible by what Stephen Darwall (writing specifically of Cudworth) has identified as an early theory of ‘practical reason’. This Platonic theory of practical reason draws together all the elements of the Cambridge Platonists’ outlook considered in earlier chapters – moral realism, divine communicative intent, and participatory epistemology, illustrating the extent to which this Platonic outlook binds together not only the thought of Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith but also runs through each of their views on different philosophical topics such as obligation, freedom and pedagogy.

For many anti-Calvinists, including the Cambridge Platonists, the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination entailed unacceptable conclusions about the character of God. Inspired by the fractious political climate, seventeenth-century English anti-Calvinists frequently accused the Calvinists of making God into an ‘arbitrary tyrant’, one who imposed his arbitrary will upon a hapless creation, unbound by any principles of justice or goodness. After considering the political and theological background from which this anti-tyrannical discourse emerges, this chapter examines the ways in which, in their attacks on the doctrine of double predestination, Benjamin Whichcote, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth and John Smith all appeal to an explicitly Platonic notion of God’s unwavering intention to communicate his goodness to creatures as far as they are able to receive it.

The Reformed theology that dominated Cambridge in the mid seventeenth century tended strongly towards a voluntarist conception of God’s relation to morality, on which God’s will is the sole determiner of moral truths. This chapter demonstrates that over the same short period (c. 1642–51), the Cambridge Platonists all took a controversial stand against the voluntarism of their Calvinist colleagues, arguing for a kind of moral realism on which God’s goodness precedes, and in a sense even constrains his will. They did this despite the fact that their realist position was routinely denied and condemned in Reformed preaching about predestination. Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith’s arguments against voluntarism and in favour of realism in this narrow time period suggest close intellectual contact while also matching Tuckney’s description of the doctrinal profile of Whichcote’s ‘learned and ingenious’ Plato-loving scholars.

Chapter 2 surveys phrases with the verb boulomai that describe the ability to do “whatever one wishes” or to live “however one wishes” as freedom in order to demonstrate that democratic freedom was understood as the ability to bring one’s will to fruition. These phrases are found in a wide range of genres, including history, philosophy, oratory, drama, and epigraphy. By defining themselves as free in contrast to slaves, Athenians perceived their actions and decisions as emanating from themselves rather than a master. Freedom was thus defined as not simply a prerequisite status for citizenship, in contrast to birth or wealth, but a personal capacity for action. This positive freedom was a central aspect of citizen identity, rendering scholarly accounts focused on negative freedom incomplete. The distinctive feature of democratic freedom was the insistence on the self as master of action; as a citizen, one did what one wished. Positive freedom gave rise to procedural components in Athenian administration and law, notably voluntarism and accountability, as well as served as a distinctive core marker of identity in contrast with other states, such as Sparta and Persia.

Christian August Crusius (1715–1775) was one of the most important German philosophers in the middle of the eighteenth century. His series of four German textbooks offered a systematic and sophisticated alternative to Wolffianism. Kant was at the beginning of his academic career when Crusius’ philosophical works were first published, so it is not surprising that Kant would come to be influenced by Crusius’ philosophy. This chapter contains a translation of selections from books 1 and 2 of Crusius’ Guide to Living Rationally (1744), capturing his theory of the will and desire, his theory of freedom, his voluntarist theory of ethics, his theory of the end of human life, and his moral proof of the immortality of the soul. The selections will help readers better understand Kant’s reference to Crusius’ moral philosophy as one based on the “will of God” (5:40), among many other things.

The conclusion proposes alternative ways to think about Christian normativity, drawing on the concepts of polydoxy and religious autonomy from Alvin Reines, with additional support from Catherine Keller and Laurel Schneider, and the concept of theological disobedience, derived from Louis Michael Seidman’s notion of constitutional disobedience.

The conservative side of the quest for true Christianity – what traditionalists call the “rule of faith” – can also be organized in terms of doctrine, culture, and politics. The second chapter begins by looking at the doctrinal quest, which focuses on the retrieval of “historic Christianity.” John Henry Newman, Karl Barth, and C. S. Lewis represent key moments in the rise of retrievalism among Protestants.

The author argues that ‘will’ and ‘consent’ are different. According to him, no State’s will is entirely free. However, this does not preclude its consent from being valid. State consent displays different shades of will: while unilateral acts are the epitome of ‘willing consent’, the degree of willingness required when accepting a treaty is weaker, until it almost disappears in the case of custom, or general principles of law. The author argues that opinio iuris and consent are also different notions: you may feel legally bound even if consent is very remote. However, whatever role ‘will’ plays in the formation of rules, once the rules exist, States are, according to the author, bound and their will is trapped. The author makes the argument that, if neither will nor consent explain the basis of a State’s obligation when it is no longer willing to implement it, they nonetheless have a stabilizing and legitimizing role. He argues that consent makes the acceptability of the obligation stronger, by comforting its legitimacy, which also makes its implementation more effective.

The author seeks to unpack five of the main discursive moves witnessed in the literature and case law pertaining to the question of consent to international law. He argues that these five specific discursive moves are performed by almost anyone engaging with the question of consent to international law, be such engagement on the more orthodox side or on the more critical side of the argumentative spectrum. The author claims that these five discursive moves correspond to the reproduction of a very modernist understanding of authority, the constitution of the very subject that is consenting, the anonymization of the author of consent, the reversal of the temporality of the legal discourse on consent and the adoption of very binary patterns of thought. This chapter shows that discursive moves made by international lawyers around the idea of consent bears heavily upon the type of political legitimacy, the type of geography, the type of responsibility, the type of temporality, and the type of hermeneutics that international law is serving.

Hobbes and Pufendorf write in Grotius’s wake and take early modern natural law in very different directions. Hobbes attempts to ground his moral and political philosophy in metaphysical materialism and to construct morality and the state with lean materials. A standard view is that he does this on a basis of psychological and rational egoism. This is too simple a view, as reciprocity plays a largely unappreciated role in his moral philosophy. For his part, Pufendorf may seem to be an orthodox theological voluntarist, grounding morality in divine command. On analysis, however, his views prove to be much more interesting. Pufendorf has deep insights about the conceptual conditions of accountability to God – namely, that those subject to divine command be able to hold themselves accountable in their own practical reasoning. And sociability plays an important role in his thought also, though somewhat differently from Grotius.

In the search for a Cuban road to socialism, those advocating a gradualist and pragmatic approach clashed with Che Guevara and his supporters, who called for a radical and voluntarist development strategy. While criticized by Cuba’s Soviet and Eastern Bloc allies, Che’s radical economic ideas, which dominated Cuban policy by 1968, were shaped by North Korea’s example as well as its material support. North Korea appeared to show a tested path through which a small country emerging from colonialism and underdevelopment could transform rapidly into a modern, industrialized, socialist republic. The Cuban–North Korean ideological encounter reflected a broader discourse taking place within the international Left at the time reflecting disillusionment with the Soviet Union and the appeal of alternative models of socialism from the global South. As an ideological consensus between Cuba and North Korea solidified in the 1960s, the two governments became principal defenders of voluntarist economics within the socialist world, in resistance to the dominant trend towards “market socialism.” This partnership was given its most vibrant expression in the 1970 sugar harvest, Cuba’s pivotal experiment in voluntarist economics, in which North Korea participated directly.

This chapter introduces the book and its inspiration, mission, central research questions and structure. It links the effectiveness of corporate social responsibility (CSR) to better understanding of its interdependent relationship with law, regulation and governance. The chapter shows that the book is unconstrained by conventional understandings and the neo-liberal voluntarism orthodoxy of some disciplines in suggesting opportunities for tackling substantive and procedural barriers for CSR in public international law, private international law and national law. It underlines the need for contextualism and a spectrum for possible legal and regulatory intermediation in fifteen ingredients of CSR.

The chapter considers the concept of regulation and a range of regulatory and non-regulatory options, including market and non-market mechanisms that governments have used and can use to advance corporate social responsibility (CSR). It recommends a six-step model for developing a CSR policy framework for governments of developing and emerging countries. The chapter therefore reiterates a more nuanced approach to regulation of CSR than the voluntarism orthodoxy acknowledges.

The ascendancy of French political power supported literary success and scientific achievement. Investigators such as Lagrange, Laplace, and Lavoisier gave mathematical and empirical support to modern chemistry, physics, and biology. In parallel, philosophical discourses on psychology led to a reinterpretation of Descartes’ formulation to focus on sensation. Condillac, Bonnet, and La Mettrie argued for the equation of mental operations and sensory input, with the result that they reduced psychology to sensation. Helvétius and Cabanis attempted to back off from such extremism by asserting the mediating role of a central ego, although both remained committed to sensory physiology. Biran and Comte recognized the consequences of reducing psychology to mere sensory physiology, but each worked out separate solutions. Biran rejected sensationalism as inadequate, suggesting an individual psychology based on consciousness and the will. In contrast Comte ultimately accepted sensationalism and dismissed psychology. For him, the individual person should properly be studied by physiology; the individual behaving in a group is the province of sociology. Comte, however, advocated a spirit of objective observation that was eventually useful to psychology. Thus, the successors to Descartes in France left psychology in a somewhat tenuous position, removed from recognition as a formal discipline.